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APFS filesystem format

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Re: APFS filesystem format

#131
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC also needs someone to run a server. Just because a protocol isn't p2p there's plenty of reason to open it. You can independently develop third party clients, use your own server instead of Apple's etc. They simply lied. They never said "We'll open Facetime, but only if it's implemented as a p2p protocol & client"

> They simply lied Changing one's mind based on changing circumstances isn't lying- it's common sense. The 'thing' that Steve Jobs wanted to publish as an open protocol stopped existing due to a lawsuit, the 'thing' that replaces it shared only its name.

I think that's an absurdly low standard to apply to corporate speech.

The CEO of a multi-billion dollar company gets on stage during their main annual product conference and says a newly announced product is going to become an open industry standard.

This turns out not to possible in exactly the way the company had planned due to a lawsuit, so the company drops the plan entirely.

That's a lie by definition. You asserted that you'd do something and then you didn't do it. Does breaking a promise imply that there can't be any mitigating circumstances? No, I'm sure there were some reasons for why FaceTime wasn't opened.

People & companies make product buying decisions based on things like these, e.g. some company might have bought a bunch of iPads for video conferencing expecting that in a couple of years they'd be inter-operable with any device they could buy, including non-Apple devices.

This excuse that they couldn't open the p2p thing they initially planned to open is absurd. Apple could absolutely have just opened & standardized what FaceTime ended up being, i.e. an open video chat client/server allowing anyone to run a server. I.e. some sort of IRC or Jabber for video messaging.

Even if they couldn't open or release some specific component due to patent concerns they could still have opened & standardized almost everything else, see e.g. how open source video players ship pluggable codec support without direct support for some proprietary & patented codecs.

Bringing this back to my original comment on APFS, do I think they won't open that? No, they probably will. I just thought I'd point out that Apple has a documented history of abandoning their open source / standardization plans after making some very public announcements about them, so people should be wary of counting their chickens before they're hatched when it comes to Apple.

Re: APFS filesystem format

#132
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They simply lied Changing one's mind based on changing circumstances isn't lying- it's common sense. The 'thing' that Steve Jobs wanted to publish as an open protocol stopped existing due to a lawsuit, the 'thing' that replaces it shared only its name.

I think that's an absurdly low standard to apply to corporate speech. The CEO of a multi-billion dollar company gets on stage during their main annual product conference and says a newly announced product is going to become an open industry standard. This turns out not to possible in exactly the way the company had planned due to a lawsuit, so the company drops the plan entirely. That's a lie by definition. You asser…

>That's a lie by definition

Telling a lie is to say something you know isn't true. If they honestly intended to open source FaceTime and then changed their mind (for whatever reason) that is not a lie by any definition.

But I agree with you that it casts doubt on their determination to follow through on their open source promises. And that sort of doubt is extremely detrimental to any uptake of open sourced software.

Re: APFS filesystem format

#133
post #26
post #16

Is there any reason to use APFS on desktop?

There are a couple features missing from HFS+. Some of these are implemented in APFS: * Case sensitivity * Clones extents / ranges (reflinking) * Holes in the middle of files * ACLs * Collapsing file ranges * Per file compression and per file encryption These are useful for apps like SQLite or other stores which implement a multi user, log structured store.

FWIW, HFS+ fully supported NFSv4 ACLs since... no idea, but they were already there in 2008.

Re: APFS filesystem format

#134
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's relationship with open source is pretty average. In the end, they use open source strategically. If there's no benefit to open-sourcing something, they won't. Clang, WebKit and Swift are "proper" open source projects, done in the open. But there aren't many of those. They have no open source apps, and most frameworks such as Cocoa, AppKit etc. are completely proprietary. Some of their open source efforts have…

They do have at least one open source application: https://www.cups.org/ it's fully open-source, and wholly owned by Apple, however they bought it, they didn't invent it.

They also lead development of LLVM and clang, which is a _huge_ project, and very useful (although sometimes without full realization of that fact) to the Open Source ecosystem.

Re: APFS filesystem format

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal is GPLv3 and readily available on Apples App Store. So no, you are mistaken.

Read your parent again: > GPLv3 software can't be on Apple products it is not saying: > App Store

Looks like I'm not getting my point across,

Here is the Tanegashima's post:

> ...GPLv3 software can't be on Apple products...

And here is jwildeboer's reply:

> ... available on Apples App Store. So no, you are mistaken

And my point is:

No he is not mistaken because you are talking about completely different topics.

Re: APFS filesystem format

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good. GPLv3 software can't be on Apple products, yet every Chromebook ships with it, because Saint Google.

Signal is GPLv3 and readily available on Apples App Store. So no, you are mistaken.

It's violating GPLv3.

Re: APFS filesystem format

#137
post #122
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not Apple's fault that they didn't open up FaceTime. They absolutely were going to, and then they were sued by a patent troll (VirtnetX), and was forced to change how FaceTime works so it relays through Apple's servers instead of going peer-to-peer. Since it was now going through Apple's servers, there was no point in opening up the protocol.

IRC also needs someone to run a server. Just because a protocol isn't p2p there's plenty of reason to open it. You can independently develop third party clients, use your own server instead of Apple's etc. They simply lied. They never said "We'll open Facetime, but only if it's implemented as a p2p protocol & client"

The whole point of opening it up is so other people's clients can talk to FaceTime users and vice versa. But Apple's not going to provide their own servers for third parties. And without that, there's no interoperability, which means there's no point in opening up the protocol.

Re: APFS filesystem format

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's relationship with open source is pretty average. In the end, they use open source strategically. If there's no benefit to open-sourcing something, they won't. Clang, WebKit and Swift are "proper" open source projects, done in the open. But there aren't many of those. They have no open source apps, and most frameworks such as Cocoa, AppKit etc. are completely proprietary. Some of their open source efforts have…

> In the end, they use open source strategically. If there's no benefit to open-sourcing something, they won't. Wouldn't that apply for most companies? Let's not pretend that Facebook, Microsoft et al do open source as a charity

They don't but they both perform much better than Apple on the subject.

React is one of the leaders in JS dev and several other Facebook projects are quite useful.

Microsoft is the company with the biggest number of open source contributors and several of their projects like TypeScript are extensively used and they are the biggest contributors to LINUX https://octoverse.github.com/

Apple made Swift an open source language that runs only on their proprietary devices and that's it...

Re: APFS filesystem format

#139
post #20
post #16

Is there any reason to use APFS on desktop?

I heard there will be copy-on-write for files. For web devs this would save a lot of space and time when copying files from yarn cache to node_modules.

I wonder what it means for appending data to a large log file. Does the entire log file need to get copied on every write (or just a block of the file?)

Re: APFS filesystem format

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the end, they use open source strategically. If there's no benefit to open-sourcing something, they won't. Wouldn't that apply for most companies? Let's not pretend that Facebook, Microsoft et al do open source as a charity

They don't but they both perform much better than Apple on the subject. React is one of the leaders in JS dev and several other Facebook projects are quite useful. Microsoft is the company with the biggest number of open source contributors and several of their projects like TypeScript are extensively used and they are the biggest contributors to LINUX https://octoverse.github.com/ Apple made Swift an open source lan…

Swift does not run "only on their proprietary devices". It runs on at least Linux as well.

I'm not saying that Apple is better, or denying that Facebook does a 'better job', but instead just reinforcing the concept that all these technology companies don't open source out of the goodness of their heart, but instead for the same strategic decisions that Apple does it for.

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